Eloise Bethell was born Mary Eloise Bethell in Georgia on May 7, 1924 to parents William Craig Pinckney Bethell and Mary Guerrant Mitchener. She was a graduate of New Hanover High School, and of Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina with a B.F.A in Theater. She supported her art career in her youth by modeling fashions in New York and Paris. Her post-graduate art career took her to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico and to France. She married Edward Van Duyn Wilkinson in 1961 with whom she had a son, Mikhael "Misha" Bethell Wilkinson (b. 1963). Bethell and her husband divorced. Eloise Bethell died on January 21, 2004.

Will Inman (poet, activist) was born William Archibald McGirt on May 3, 1923 in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was a graduate of Duke University with a B.A. in English. Inman taught poetry courses at American University in Washington, D.C. and Montgomery College in Maryland. He and Eloise Bethell collaborated on many works, most notably Bethell's "Mexico: A Landscape in People" in 1986. Inman had a son, William Stanley, with Violet Stanley. Inman married Barbara Ann Sherman in 1969, and they divorced in 1975. Inman passed away from Parkinson's Disease on October 3, 2009 in Arizona.